As a black Jewish writer, I obviously want to read books written by and highlighting the stories of Jews of color. That’s easier said than done, though. It’s not that these stories don’t exist — Jewish literature is an amazing, rich genre of diasporic Jewish stories.

While there are now several books on the Bene Israeli and Baghdadi Jewish heritage of Mumbai that are more extensive in terms of research and even visual documentation, Robbins and Sohoni’s Jewish Heritage of the Deccan: Mumbai, The Northern Konkan and Pune combines luminous photography and brief commentary.

Two excellent books accompanied me through the darkness of these last months. The first was Wesley Lowery's "They Can't Kill Us All," a devastating front-line account of the police killings and the young activism that sparked one of the most significant racial justice movements since the 1960s: Black Lives Matter.

The authors’ main focus is on what they call "diverse Jews," and their primary study relates to the United States. They estimate that "at least 20 percent of the Jewish population in the United States is racially and ethnically diverse, including African, African American, Latino (Hispanic), Asian, Native American, Sephardic, Mizrachi, and mixed-race Jews by heritage, adoption, and marriage" (21).

Jane Gordon, Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies., 08/24/2006

Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, in Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century, reopens the question of whether there was a “golden age” of cooperation between Black and Jewish groups from the 1940s-1960s. And more interestingly, she asks whether the subsequent decline and disrepair of that partnership is permanent.

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Search the world's largest online archive of material about Jewish diversity.